Simple Stories Vintage Great Escape

Every so often a collection comes out that just sings to your heart. In fairness most of the Simple Stories collections do but the new Great Escape really speaks to me. 

I love the natural colours, the beautiful tones, the leaves and toadstools and the wonderful phrases. 

I have had so much fun playing with it and want to share some of the pages with you 

I had fun doodling a border on this one 

 

 

I spent my 60th birthday photographing the big cats and I have to say Ngosi pictured here was one of my favourites and I got to hand feed him. 

 

 

 

This was a visit to the gorgeous Painted Desert in Arizona 

And closer to home - my favourite happy place - Poole Park 

Do check out the range in stores because it is utterly fabulous 

Adding a bit more colour...

Hello everyone, Katherine here - this month I wanted to take a look at adding a bit more colour to pages, especially when you have quite neutral papers.  So the benefit of neutral papers like Hello New Year from Simple Stories and also Winter Wishes from BoBunny is that any photo will go with them,  but then I like a little more colour.  I often use inks and am loving the distress oxides at the moment.  For my first page I chose colours from my scarf and added them in a band, then adde some bits of stamping in co-ordinating colours and other embellishments that matched - the perfect sort of page to put together if you sort everything by colour.  The black and white of Hello New Year worked perfectly to give a break from all the colour around my photo.

I loved that technique so much that I also used it in this months virtual crop - there are some instructions about how to add distress inks and oxides using just a little bit of plastic if you haven't tried this technique yet.

Winter Wishes does have a mix of blues in with browns and creams, it's a beautiful wintry collection, for this one I wanted to pull out the orange of my husbands coat...and didn't have orange paint!  I started with gesso and then mixed in some of my brusho inks in reds and yellows until I got a shade that I was happy with.  Still wanting to continue the mess I added some sparkle with BoBunny's confetti paste in silver, a few punched snowflakes and nuevo drops and I was done.  

Dig out your neutral papers and add a bit of colour!